Film Review - Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Kraven the Hunter is said to be the last film in the Columbia Pictures Spider-Verse that doesn’t have a Spider-Man in it and is directed by JC Chandor who you might remember from such films as A Most Violent Year and Triple Frontier and concerns the aforementioned Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is on the trail of gangsters who have kidnapped his brother (Fred Heichinger) but he also has to contend with his past as the son of a powerful mafia boss (Russell Crowe.)

Kraven the Hunter is not a terrible movie per se but it is another film that feels dull to sit through and lazy in its production and what makes this feel worse is that this has talented people at the helm, Chandor is a good director but here it feels like he was handed a script from the Columbia Committee and told to make the best of it and if you’ve seen A Most Violent Year or Triple Frontier you know this guy is capable of so much better about morally grey characters and exciting action and this film falls very very short in both regards.

And again this comes down to the script, Richard Wenk wrote the Equalizer films and those films got better and better with each entry while Art Markum and Matt Holloway co-wrote Iron Man in 2008 so they can do good work but here it just feels like they went “okay what have we got/let’s do this/okay done” and its so dull, Taylor-Johnson is a good actor and watching him here I could see why he’s been whispered as the new James Bond but all he really does here is spout some lines, stare into the camera, scowl a bit and leap around and punch things real hard.

As for the rest of the cast they’ve been much better elsewhere, I love Ariana DeBose especially in West Side Story but here she just plays the legal ally to Kraven and finds herself caught in his storyline, Alessandro Nivola plays the Rhino and that character just looks stupid in live action (the 2018 PS4 Spider-Man game did a great rendition of this character that so easily could’ve been adapted to here but that would require giving a damn) while Heichinger is okay but only really exists to setup another character.

As for Mr Russell Crowe well I remember when he was a fun actor to watch but instead he’s just doing a smorgasbord of silly accent recently be it a Russian one here, a Romanian one in the Pope’s Exorcist (where I did enjoy him) and Con the Fruiterer in Thor: Love and Thunder and regrettably he doesn’t kill someone with a landline telephone.

And so that is Kraven the Hunter and again it isn’t terrible but when the studio putting it out releases the opening 8 minutes online it screams a lack of confidence and well it ain’t hard to see why they gave up on it, its dull and by the numbers and if these comic book movies are going to continue to justify the existence they’ve enjoyed for the last 15-20 years they need to be much much better than they have been and that includes DC and Marvel Studios, 1.5 out of 5.